Safety Fears in Torrance Strain Ties With Mobil

Ten years before Torrance sued Mobil Oil to have its refinery declared a public nuisance and a threat to the community, Cynthia Elizabeth Moore was driving by the refinery on her way to a concert.

When her car stalled, the 19-year-old woman tried to restart the engine--not knowing it had been smothered by a vapor cloud leaking from the refinery’s nearby tank farm. The spark from Moore’s starter ignited a huge fire that burned for two days.

Moore--with burns over 97% of her body--lingered 20 hours before she died.

Two refinery workers also burned to death.

A Superior Court civil jury later determined that the tragedy was caused by refinery negligence, but there was no immediate action taken by the city against Mobil.

It wasn’t until another thunderous explosion and two-day fire in November, 1987, that Torrance focused its attention on safety at Mobil.

Nevertheless, Torrance Councilman Tim Mock said the origins of today’s conflict with the sprawling refinery can be traced to that December day in 1979, “with that woman getting blown away with the gasoline fumes. That was the start of it.”

Changing City

The accident illustrated how the city was changing in ways that portended trouble for Mobil. The refinery, once alone in bean fields, was now surrounded by homes and busy suburban streets. Heavy industry and its inevitable safety threats now began to be perceived as at odds with the serenity and security of Torrance’s otherwise suburban landscape.

It took other deaths and serious injuries at Mobil, other explosions and fires, dozens of air pollution violations and the discovery of extensive ground water and hazardous waste contamination before the city sued this month in Los Angeles Superior Court, alleging that the Mobil refinery is a public nuisance and seeking authority to regulate it.

The conflict has shattered once-amicable relations between the city and Torrance’s biggest private property owner and taxpayer. It has raised far-reaching land-use questions involving the compatibility of refineries and other heavy industry near homes.

Officials say the city’s readiness to sue was fueled by public perceptions that Mobil, the sixth largest U.S. corporation, is--in the words of the lawsuit--”callous and indifferent” to safety.

The lawsuit said that Mobil’s use of acutely toxic chemicals poses a lethal threat to thousands of people and that even lesser accidents can reach beyond the refinery’s fence to affect the lives and health of residents and passers-by.

The focused attention of regional, state and federal agencies on problems at the refinery was also a factor in the city’s decision to sue.

Torrance’s normally placid council has become riven with jealousy over who should get the credit for protecting the public. Dan Walker, a politically ambitious councilman, infuriated his council colleagues by launching a ballot initiative aimed at the refinery just as the city was preparing its lawsuit.

Taking a more cautious approach, the city now seeks a court’s blessing to regulate the only West Coast refinery of Mobil, one of the world’s biggest industrial giants, with 1988 sales of $48 billion. The Torrance refinery supplies 12% of the gasoline used in Southern California.

“There is a real question in everyone’s mind: Is what they are doing safe, being so close to residential,” Councilwoman Dee Hardison asked. “. . . That trust isn’t there any more.”

Wyman D. Robb, manager of the Mobil refinery, conceded in a January letter to Torrance officials that trust between the city and the company had eroded but expressed confidence that through safety improvements, Mobil “can regain the good will of the residents of Torrance.”

In an interview, Robb termed the lawsuit “unfortunate.”

“I can’t expect that relations between Mobil and the city will improve, but I hope they will not deteriorate,” he said.

“We are in a very severe situation trying to operate effectively with a community surrounding us. We are not going to change the location of the houses. The only flexibility we have is to adapt, to improve our operations so they don’t impinge on residents.” Robb added that Mobil is seeking an alternative to the acutely hazardous chemicals it uses at the refinery.

Founded in 1912 by Jared Sidney as a “modern industrial city,” Torrance traced much of its early growth to smokestack industry, particularly steel and oil. A forest of wooden oil rigs rose after the first gusher of the Torrance oil field in 1921. With a ready supply of crude, the Mobil refinery, then General Petroleum, opened in 1929.

But the city began evolving after World War II. In the 1950s, it rapidly turned into a suburb, with tract homes rising near the refinery. In the 1970s, Torrance became home to what was then the world’s largest shopping mall, the Del Amo Fashion Center, and neighborhood concerns about growth, traffic and noise became dominant factors in City Council races.

The old heavy industry was dying. In the 1980s, the city successfully wooed Pacific Rim traders and high-tech clean industry to new industrial parks. The American headquarters of Honda and Toyota replaced a U.S. Steel plant.

Torrance is now known for good schools, good air--when the wind doesn’t come from the refinery--and homes with manicured lawns selling for $300,000 and more.

In this upscale and generally peaceful suburban scene, city officials wonder whether Torrance can live with the largest vestige of its smokestack past.

“The burden of proof is upon Mobil at this point,” said Mayor Katy Geissert.

Robb said Mobil is trying to convince the city that safety is a top priority and that new safety programs will make the refinery safer.

“We unfortunately cannot change overnight,” he said. “There are a lot of things that we are working on many, many fronts at the same time.”

Referring to the lawsuit and safety studies that the city has required in the last year, Robb added that “the city has taken the approach they need to respond to the community sentiments. In my opinion, they have taken a fairly responsible approach in sponsoring the safety review and an increased level of communication between Mobil and the city.” Mobil, he said, has hired a public relations firm to improve its image in Torrance.

“We had a very serious accident in November, 1987,” he said. “It scared us as much as it did the community. It was something that raised a certain level of consciousness about the refinery’s presence. Unfortunately, we had a series of other accidents.”

The fatal accidents, fires, explosions and gas releases during the last decade, have been recurrent reminders of the dangers at Mobil. The Torrance Fire Department has responded to more than 127 emergency calls at the refinery in the last 10 years. That record, the city claims in its lawsuit, indicates “severe problems with safety conditions and procedures at the refinery.”

In addition to the explosion in 1979 that killed Moore and the two refinery workers, a contract worker died of asphyxiation in March, 1987.

The explosion in November, 1987, shattered windows in nearby homes and sparked a spectacular fire that burned for two days, releasing about 100 pounds of acutely toxic hydrofluoric acid. The release apparently injured no one.

After the explosion, Mobil had a string of accidents. In April, 1988, a contract employee fell to his death. Two unrelated explosions and fires occurred on the same day--July 15, 1988--and one man was blown up and 10 more suffered serious injuries.

Last month, foul-smelling gases sent eight students and two teachers at nearby Magruder Middle School to hospitals suffering from nausea, headaches, chest pains and dizziness.

“It was the worst kind of rotten egg (smell) you can imagine,” Principal Sidney Morrison said. Mobil footed the hospital bills but, as with many short-lived odor incidents, said it had no information that the refinery was the source.

Through a combination of circumstances, the 1987 fire in Mobil’s alkylation unit gave Torrance officials a warning about the potential for a major catastrophe.

Less than a month before the Mobil explosion, an accident at the Marathon Oil refinery in Texas City, Tex., released about 6,000 gallons of hydrofluoric acid, an acutely hazardous substance used by some refineries, including Mobil, to boost the octane of unleaded gasoline. The resulting toxic cloud forced the evacuation of 4,000, the hospitalization of several hundred and the defoliation of trees for miles.

Citing the Texas City accident and industry-sponsored 1986 acid spill tests that showed that a 1,000-gallon release of hydrofluoric acid of two minutes duration could kill everybody exposed up to five miles downwind, the private Environmental Policy Institute warned that refinery use of the chemical could cause a “Bhopal-scale accident.”

The warning was sounded on the third anniversary of the Dec. 4, 1984, leak of methyl isocyanate at a Union Carbide plant in Bhopal, India, that claimed more than 3,000 lives in the world’s worst industrial disaster.

The South Coast Air Quality Management District examined the Mobil explosion together with the spill tests and the Texas City accident and, in January, 1988, created a task force to consider whether the use of hydrofluoric acid at four Los Angeles-area refineries and a manufacturing facility should be eliminated.

The other refineries, all smaller than Mobil’s, are the Ultramar refinery in Wilmington and the Golden West and Powerine refineries in Santa Fe Springs. The Allied Chemical plant in El Segundo also uses hydrofluoric acid. The task force is scheduled to release a status report in May.

The air quality agency continued to cite Mobil for air pollution violations as it has done repeatedly for years. But in 1988, other government agencies also began showing intense interest in Mobil’s shortcomings. Refinery manager Robb likened the scrutiny to being “under the microscope.”

- Last month, state water-quality officials ordered a cleanup of a huge plume of gasoline, 25 feet thick in places, that had contaminated ground water up to 1,200 feet beyond the refinery boundaries.

- In August, the state Department of Health Services filed suit alleging that the refinery had repeatedly violated toxic waste disposal laws.

- In November--after conducting a top-to-bottom inspection--the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration issued 100 citations to Mobil and 10 contractors, more than half of them for serious violations of federal worker safety laws.

As the enforcement actions mounted and the accidents continued, Torrance council members found their constituents increasingly nervous about Mobil. The council was not satisfied with Mobil’s assurances that the refinery had used hydrofluoric acid safely for 40 years, knew its dangers and had adequately trained its personnel. And they began to worry about the city’s liability if a major catastrophe occurred.

Two consultant studies of the refinery, financed by Mobil, failed to reassure the council. The first study, which Mobil challenged, attacked the oil company for lax management that it said contributed to an unacceptably high number of accidents compared to other refineries. The second study concluded that there was almost no risk to the public from hydrofluoric acid.

But council members faulted Mobil’s risk study for failing to provide the city with worst-case disaster scenarios and hired their own consultant to evaluate it. His report has not yet been completed. City officials were also angered when they received no detailed answer to a 14-page list of health and safety questions sent to Mobil in February.

Mobil officials said at the time that the material would only scare people and on Friday, Robb said Mobil decided not to answer the list of questions because company lawyers advised against it.

Warning specifically that a Bhopal-like disaster could occur in Torrance, Councilman Walker began planning his initiative campaign against hydrofluoric acid at the refinery. The initiative would limit storage of hydrofluoric acid on site to 250 gallons, a move that would effectively eliminate its use at the refinery, which typically has on hand more than 29,000 gallons. Walker’s effort increased pressure on the rest of the council to act and seems certain to keep the issue alive through the municipal elections next spring.

But his council colleagues, angered that Walker was receiving the lion’s share of attention for his efforts on safety at Mobil, chose a lawsuit as an alternative, arguing that a judicial ruling would protect the city against a legal challenge by Mobil. In addition, they faulted Walker for concentrating on hydrofluoric acid when the city is also concerned about five other acutely toxic chemicals at the refinery.

For Larry Robinson, stepfather of Cynthia Elizabeth Moore, the city’s lawsuit is long overdue.

“I totally support the action the city is taking,” said Robinson, a Torrance police captain.

“My biggest concern is that questions will remain as long as the suit goes on, which could be several years. All the time of the legal maneuvering, the city is in danger of an incident. Until the matter is resolved, it is going to be business as usual at Mobil.”